There have been a lot of changes in the CDN vendor landscape over the past few months, so here’s an updated list of all the vendors I am tracking. They are broken out by vendors that offer commercial CDN services to content owners, and vendors that offer CDN platforms for MSO and carriers. (You can easily find this list at anytime by going to www.cdnlist.com)

The term CDN means many things to different people and is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different types of content delivery services. Video streaming, software downloads, web and mobile content acceleration, licensed/managed CDN, transparent caching, and services to measure CDN performance, load balancing, multi-CDN switching and analytics and cloud intelligence. It’s a complex ecosystem with a lot of vendors both large and small. You also have some CDNs that cross over into other industries like security and WAN optimization, two segments that for the most part, are not included in my list.

Just because two vendors are on the same list together, it does not mean they should be compared to each other at a company level. You have to compare the services they offer apples-to-apples. Some are more regional than others, some are targeting certain sized customers and some only focus on certain types of content delivery.

Telco/Carrier Based CDN DeploymentsWe hear a lot about telcos and carriers in the CDN market, but the vast majority of them have built out CDNs for their own internal use and are not selling it as a commercial CDN service. There are a few exceptions like Level 3, Verizon, Comcast and Tata who offer commercial CDN services and compete against other commercial CDNs, but most telco and carrier based commercial CDN services are based off of reselling a traditional CDN, for example AT&T reselling Akamai. This telco/carrier list is far from being complete and needs to be updated.

CDN Related Vendor Acquisitions/Closures
In addition to the current crop of vendors in the market, I think it’s important to remember how the CDN industry got to where it is today. Many CDNs raised tons of money but didn’t have a business model, some only focused on selling at the lowest price and many had technology that simply didn’t work. Lots of CDNs went under, some within a short time of launching. The CDN market has been through a lot of hard times over the past 20 years and here’s a running list of those who got acquired or went under.

Each time I make a list of vendors, for any solution or service in the market, I always get emails from companies asking why they are not on the list. If you think you should be added to the list, please add it to the comments section but note that I am not listing regional hosting providers or companies who get most of their sales from $100 a month customers. Also, just because you are not on this list doesn’t mean you don’t have a valid solution in the market, but the companies listed are the ones I get asked about most often, get mentioned in the media, are included in major RFPs and promote and market their services to medium and large customers.